The Threads I Return To

People sometimes ask me, “Why do you write so much about love?” The truth is, love has been both my greatest teacher and my most painful wound, and it’s the one thing we all carry, no matter who we are or who we love. The same is true of grief: it spares no one, and it connects us just as deeply as love does.

When I began writing publicly, I didn’t set out with a mission statement. I wasn’t trying to wave a banner or announce: this is gay love poetry. I was just trying to make sense of my relationships, my heartbreaks, my joy and eventually, my losses. Over time, I realized something important: whether my poems were about a man, a woman, or no one in particular, the feelings inside them, tenderness, longing, heartbreak, grief, were universal.

I don’t write about grief because I want to linger in sadness. I write about it because it’s the only way I know how to process it. Writing is how I hold space for what I’ve lost, and how I remind myself that grief is never just mine to carry.

For a long time, I thought I had to frame my work as explicitly queer to give it purpose. But what I’m learning is that it doesn’t need to be “framed” at all. I just write, and I happen to be gay. And in that way, my work holds both: the universality of love and grief, and the specificity of my own story.

As a perfectionist, I still wrestle with how much of myself to explain or define, but I’m learning that I don’t have to explain everything. The work can just exist, and it can evolve, and it can still matter. Because love and grief are the great equalizers. We all know what it is to love, and we all know what it is to lose. In those places, we are united.

Poetry reminds me that while our experiences are shaped by who we are, our emotions are what connect us. Writing about grief in particular helps me process and reflect, but more than that, it lets me share the message that none of us are truly alone in loss.

Love, identity, grief. They’re the threads I keep returning to, because they’re the threads that bind us all. How do you personally find ways to process and share your grief?